The Scraps Come MARCHing In!

Welcome to March! I always love March because we usually get our first real taste of Spring. Never mind what the calendar says. The sun shines warmer and at a higher angle. Days are noticeably longer, daffodils and other bulbs begin appearing and birds that have been gone for months are back, chirping their little heads off. It seems that with every passing year, I appreciate to a greater extent all the little things that Mother Nature gifts us with! 

First, some random disheartening news for us. The Veteran’s Administration turned Bruce down for benefits after 8 months of calls, exams, tests, forms, etc. Not because he didn’t quality physically - he did. Two of the three cancers he’s had in his adulthood are directly attributable to his service in VietNam in 1972 (the chemical Agent Orange): (1) the sarcoma in his right arm that we fought with surgeries for ten years and eventually led to the amputation of his arm in 2020, and (2) his current CLL - Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. We were rejected because we “make too much money”. Two monthly Social Security incomes and his RMD - Required Minimum Distribution - required minimum monthly withdrawal from savings of all seniors 75 or over.  Well, crap on a cracker. Luckily we have excellent (read: costly) private health insurance, but we just feel like we got the middle finger from Uncle Sam. Thanks for your service, Bruce, but don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Oh, and you will be owing us all the copays for the dozens of exams and tests we put you through over the last eight months before we got around to simply checking your income level. Insult, meet injury. It’s been a tough week. 

But enough whining. As always when the going gets rough, I turn to sewing. Fewer calories than alcohol, and a lot more fun. Cue up the soothing instrumental music (reserved for particularly stressful times) and sew the afternoon away….

The first goal this week was to put the final border on my SAHRR (Stay at Home Round Robin). This week’s hostess was Emily from The Darling Dogwood. Emily called the kite shape. I’ll admit that I love that shape but took the easy way out. I only put the kites in the four corners of the final border so that I could frame the quilt with a solid(-ish) border. Here’s the finished top.

The top now measures 46.5 x 58.5”. This time I tried to pin the quilt neatly to the design board. Of course, I had to pin it sideways and then rotate the photo, but that’s just how it is. And trying to pin it straight obviously doesn’t work for me, LOL!!

Now, we have until March 24 to finish - quilting and binding - our tops. The final linkup will take place then, and I’ll be participating. Pictures and links to come at that time. It’s been another fun challenge, and I’d like to thank all the ladies who hosted this year’s challenge. They put in a lot of work! 

Those who’ve read my blog for any amount of time know that I adore sewing string blocks. One of my goals this year is to sew ten (8.5”) blocks with black centers every month. I call these Nann’s strings, because she introduced me to them. My blocks are sewn in 4.5x8.5” halves, and then two are sewn together to make an 8.5” block. It turns out that after two months sewing these between other projects, I already have 30 blocks! Yep, I loves me my strings!

I’ve also been sewing two 12.5” Halloween blocks every month in 2025. At this pace, I’ll have all 16 sewn by the end of August. September will see me add them to the Haunted House panel, and then do some custom quilting it. I hope to have it all ready to use by October 1. I’ve always made Autumn season quilts, but this will be my first Halloween quilt. 

Here are the four total blocks I have so far.

And these are the two I did in February. Try to ignore my awful orange spikes. Remember the galloping horse rule!! 

With a new month comes a new color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. For March, Angela has called for us to dig into our yellows and enjoy their cheer! I’m down for it! On Friday, I spent a pleasant afternoon sorting the scraps, making piles, and cutting out my RSC blocks for the month. 

All I can say is that the string pile in the bottom right corner doesn’t look as big in this picture as it is in real life. I’m hoping to get 30-45 blocks from it. I can hardly wait to dig into. 

Today Bruce and I plan to go on a long walk and then maybe have a coffee date at Barnes & Noble. I’ve got beef and chicken strips marinating for fajitas tonight, so the remaining prep will be easy. Other than that, you can find me in my sewing room. 

Have a good week, friends!

PS. To my dear friend TW (you know who you are), I’m so sorry I forgot your special day. You are always in our thoughts and hearts. We’ll call you this week to catch up.

A Drive-By Post

Yikes! I usually write my blogpost, or a good portion of it, on Friday evenings so that I can just touch it up and publish on Saturday morning. But I totally forgot last night. So here I am, scrambling to get something written before flying out the door. Ruby and another of my friends from the neighborhood (Maureen) and I are all heading up to Park City to play at the Habitat for Humanity. That’s where, every Saturday morning, H4H has huge box loads of clothing for $2-3. This is all new, current stuff - Amazon overstock. If you’re interested in knowing more or seeing pictures, let me know. 

But let’s get to business.  This week in the Stay ar Home Round Robin, our hostess, Brenda at Songbird Designs, is hosting the fifth round. She called for Log Cabin blocks.  This is what I came up with for this penultimate round:

After last week’s “framing” round, I wanted to include just a little bit more background white in this round. The 3” round boosted the quilt top measurements to 38.5”x50.5”. Remember that this is a kid quilt, so I’m not going for BIG or too much white!that bottom border is really bugging me, so I plan to trim a bit  from the white - it looks too “eased in”. I’ll recheck the measurements and fix that this weekend before the sixth and final round is called on Monday.

I’ve planned this orange fabric that I’d like to use as my primary color for the final round. We’ll see, though, what our prompt will be.

For the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, I finished six flying geese blocks (6.5”) using blues, the February color of the month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

I’m also working on 6.5” blue crumb blocks, which I’ll show next week along with my update on the black-centered half-rectangle string blocks. Oh! And I still have to complete two Halloween blocks next week to keep up with my plan of two per month. I’ve got those all cut out, so the sewing should be relatively straightforward. 

Next Monday is also our February HOA Board meeting, and it will be my first time presenting as Treasurer. But I am prepared. And then on Tuesday afternoon (after my Tuesday morning Weight Watchers workshop), the HOA Board has a legal seminar to attend. But hey - after that, my week is FREE - FREE I tell you!! I plan to cloister myself in my sewing room and not come up for air until Thursday or Friday-ish. Wish me luck!

Running Hot, Cold and In Circles

This week I have a cool blue quilt finish that hasn’t been shared here before, the weekly progress on my hot-colored quilt top for the Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR), and some news (read: whining) about the beginning of the seasonal onslaught of HOA work. 

Let’s start with the blues. No, I’m not going to sing for you. You’re welcome. Blue is the February color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. This week I completed the string blocks - 60 of them. Four groups of 15 for Quilts for Kids; the “cools” referred to in the blog title

The blocks are 6.5” square. I love making string blocks, and there is more of that planned for later in the month.

This week I also finished a quilt from scraps I obtained last year. At the 2024 World Wide Quilt Day festivities held here in the Salt Lake Valley at the Sandy Senior Center, they were distributing quilt “kits” made of miscellaneous scraps that were semi-color-coordinated. You had to sign up to take a kit and every kit had a number. They retained a picture of the scraps so that they could verify that you used most of the scraps. We were also free to add our own scraps. The challenge was to use the scraps in a quilt, of any design, and ultimately donate it to charity. Easy Peasy. I do that all the time with my scraps and Quilts for Kids. 

But. (You knew that was coming, eh?). The kit looked charming on the outside, but some of the pieces were totally gag-worthy. Also, two long strips I was given had the selvage edge and little holes (you know, from the reels during the printing process) along the length of them. After trimming that off, about half the length was unusable for a 3.5” width, the minimum piece size I needed. (Clear as mud?) but I included it, along with a couple questionable gray pieces and teal pieces. I added the white and the navy. Here’s what I can up with. 

What drew me to this kit was the cute dolphin WHALE fabric and the bright blue water fabric. but the stripey stuff was a challenge. Anyway, the pattern I originally drafted was for 10” (finished) squares, but I had to reduce them to 8” to accommodate the scrap sizes. The individual block pieces are cut: center white strip of 2.5x8.5”, and two side strips composed of a 3.5” square and a rectangle of 3.5”x5.5” pieces. The colored side pieces are flipped on either side of the center white strip. When sewn, it makes the 8.5” square. When the blocks are sewn, they’re flipped horizontally and vertically, like a sort of basketweave pattern. I interspersed 8.5” squares of the dolphin fabric and used almost every square inch of it.

Honestly, I was disappointedly in how the colors panned out. But it’s done, and it will be donated after I check it in at WW Quilt Day to be entered into a random prize drawing. I already have the Quilts for Kids label on it. I quilted it with loops. It measure 40x55”, a decent kid size.

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This week we were also challenged with Round Four of the SAHRR. This week’s hostess was my friend Wendy of Pieceful Thoughts. She challenged us to make sliced blocks. You know, cut the block, insert a strip or turn it or otherwise manipulate it. Clever! 

This is where my hot-colored quilt top started out after last week’s round 3:

And here is where it ended up after I added this week’s round 4:

I knew the top was due for a calmer round free of angles, giving the quilt a bit of an interim frame. I was also going to type here that it would give the eyes a place to rest, but can you really say that about assorted dancing vegetables on a yellow-orange field? Probably not. In its current state, the top now measures 32.5x44.5”. If you’d like to see how the SAHRR quilt tops are shaping up after four rounds (I highly recommend it), visit Wendy’s blog and linky party HERE. 

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Running in circles: New Accounts Payable system for the HOA. Drove across the valley one morning (in single-digit icy weather) to meet the accounting staff at our property management company and be introduced to the new program. Then conducted a meeting at our clubhouse same afternoon so we can train and transition the landscape volunteers to monitor and report issues - relating to pests and landscape - so I can unload the coordination of that onto someone else. It will happen, but now I am in charge of working with Bug Busters (our pest control company) too. That’s in addition to the Treasurer duties and writing the monthly newsletter. And did I mention that we have a legal seminar one afternoon in a couple weeks? Gotta know the governing statutes and where HOA responsibility ends and homeowner responsibilities start (or vice versa). It’s going to be a crazy year, and I’ve all but decided that I won’t run again next year for office. 

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That’s it. On Saturday (either today or tomorrow, depending on when you’re reading this), I have Quilts for Kids, then on Sunday, Ruby and Cousin Kim come over for the Church of Bernina, which is what we call our sewing day. Heaven knows how sewing restores our souls!! Have a great week!! xo

Sewing the Blues

What a nice week! Not weather-wise, because it’s February. It’s cold and windy, rainy and snowy. But I got in a lot of fun sewing time, friend time and on Saturday both my sons and families will be over for an evening of Mexican food and fun. I bought some mini roses potted in cute ceramic ladybugs for granddaughter London (now age 15) and my daughter-in-law Kim. And chocolate too (naturally). 

So, let’s start off with this week’s round for the Stay At Home Round Robin. Our hostess for Round three this week was Gail, and she called STARS. This is where my quilt top was at the end of last week:

Last week’s progress

First I added another red stop border to separate this round from the spikey half-square triangles of the previous round. I decided to further lengthen the piece by adding a row to the top only. I sewed up my favorite Friendship Stars with flip corners because I love the pattern it gives. 

I know these photos look wonky. That’s because I’m in the (bad?) habit of pinning the four corners snugly and forgetting about pinning along the long sides. Really, it is not bowed. 

I will trim the spacers at the ends of the new row once I begin the next round. The top now measures 26.5 x 36.5” after three rounds. I’m really looking forward to the next round! If you’d like to see everyone’s creative progress so far, hop on over to Gail’s linky gathering for this round HERE. 

There was also a lot of therapeutic blue scrap sewing for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge this week. First I worked on these two Weathervane blocks - one darker and the other with light and bright blue scraps. These fun blocks measure 12.5”, unfinished.

And then I pulled out some of my blue 1.5” strips to make these Switchplate blocks. They are so quick and easy. I’m making lots of these as I go with no particular plan as yet. 

Next week I’ll be showing the scrappy blue string blocks I’ve already started on. I’ve got 45 so far and hope to get another 15 out of my remaining blue scraps or I may have to cut a few from larger chunks. I like to donate them to Quilts for Kids in pinned batches of 15 because that fits nicely into their pre-cut quilt kits that quilters check out to sew into little quilts. 

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Bruce and I took some nice walks this week as weather permitted. On Wednesday I went out with some new friends (and some old friends) to lunch, and on Thursday it was cards (Hand and Foot) at the clubhouse. When Bruce and I went grocery shopping at our usual store today, they didn’t have any wheat rolls - for the second week - in the bakery section. No wheat dinner rolls, ciabatta rolls or whole grain hard rolls. Only white rolls. So we went to another store and it was the same thing there. What’s going on? Bewildered, Bruce and I joked that Trump must’ve banned everything but white bread in stores now. Gotta make jokes to survive this embarrassing nightmare that’s befallen our country. 

Have a good week, my friends!